How to measure AHT in Zendesk tickets

Customer service managers often wish to measure Average Handling Time (AHT), a figure showing the average amount of time agents spend on the phone with customers. Getting the right data from babelforce requires only a single event, but the trigger conditions are quite specific.

This guide will show you how to get the two main variants of AHT into a Zendesk Ticket: firstly for inbound calls, and then for outbound.

1. Inbound

This is the most common method: inbound calls go through some kind of IVR, are queued then bridged with an agent. As soon as the call is bridged, we need the platform to start measuring the length of this call.

To do that we need to configure an Event which fires when the call finishes, measuring the length at that point and sending this value somewhere useful. In this case, we will just send it to an appropriate custom field of a Zendesk ticket:

This looks like a standard update ticket Event, but look at the trigger – it seems to be a custom one. The following screenshot shows the exact conditions you need to be able to measure the correct part of the call:

Domain is equal to internal checks that the call leg was started by the platform, not a consumer

Source is equal to queue ensures that the leg came specifically from the queue

Type: Outbound call is given checks that it is an outbound leg (made from the platform to the agent)

Call duration is greater than 0 checks that the leg was actually bridged

When this Event fires, you can then be sure that the platform is only measuring correct leg and that it will appear in the allotted place:

2. Outbound

When measuring AHT for outbound calls, the Event is exactly has the same configuration except for the trigger. Seeing as the trigger specifies which part of the call should be measured, we need a different one:

This is the only mechanism you need to start getting AHT information automatically into tickets. There are 2 things to note on the Zendesk side:

You must have already created a custom ticket field of the type 'Decimal' in order for this to turn up in the 'Fields' tab of an Event

Using gooddata, the BI tool embedded in Zendesk, it is possible to create a metric from custom ticket field data and use it to create reports from your phone service. You must use this or another aggregator in conjunction with custom ticket field data in order to measure the average handling time over a number of calls.